Welcome, friends. You’re in good company and we’ve been anticipating the presence of each one of you, by name, for weeks.
There’s a pleasant note of déjà vu in the air this evening because it was in this very city some eight years ago that five of us gathered for an impromptu dinner after a late afternoon SBL session. Christopher Hays—then a Mesa Scholar—and Milton Acosta, a mutual colleague of ours at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia had just finished presenting on the Faith and Displacement project they orchestrated in the context of Colombia’s painful experience of forced displacement. We gathered for food and a friendly debrief.
And now this…
We are not here to sell you on our two organizations this evening. The fact that you’ve joined us suggests an existing interest. But we do want to read you into developments, particularly around our respective growing edges. And we’re grateful you’ve set aside time for us to do this. If you’re only here for the food and wine, that’s OK, too. Just don’t say it out loud.
I invite you to pray with me…
Father of light, Father of love, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we thank you for this evening … for this city … for these friends … and for this abundance. We pray your kindness upon those who will serve us at table this evening. Will you draw mercifully near each one, near to us as this room’s little evening company of Jesus. Amen.
We Mesa Scholars choose to do hard things in under-resourced places.
We sometimes find inspiration—though it sounds immodest to say so—from the Jesuits. In their best moments, the Company of Jesus manifests a reverence for learning and the life of the mind, on the one hand. On the other, I am fascinated by the adventurous spirit that leads the Jesuits to go almost anywhere. This fruitful juxtaposition seems worthy of imitation, even in our far humbler and small-c ‘company of Jesus’@ Mesa Scholars.
We choose to do hard things in under-resourced places.
We’re happy to play the long game as we do, drawing strength and balance from Scripture’s agricultural metaphors.
A number of us soldier along as solid profs in places with too few of them, hopefully serving as the kind of life-shaping presence and influence whose practitioners have shaped you and me in our own trajectory as students. For me that stable of dignitaries includes precious, well-weathered names like Jerry Hawthorne, Gary Pratico, and Robert Gordon. You will have your own. We support and celebrate our teachers, who day in and day out do the hard things of teaching in under-resourced places.
But at Mesa Scholars there’s more than just solid teaching.
Anthony Buck, DPhil Oxford, explores the nature of agency and its relationship to AI as we develop an Anglican Triangle strategy that positions Anthony within institutions well known and little known in Santiago, Cape Town, and Oxford.
A number of us, under the editorial vision of our colleague Milton Acosta, write a new kind of Spanish-language biblical commentary, reading each book of the Old Testament across nine volumes through the lens of comunión y bienestar—very roughly human flourishing—as portrayed in Genesis 1-2. This fresh project emerges just as a generation of Latin American evangelicals largely unformed by individualistic assumptions imported from the North take up the mantle of leadership in nuestra América.
Emmylou Grosser, on the back of her OUP-published book, chips away at the vestiges of a three-century-old understanding of biblical poetry and offers up an alternative, all while insisting, credibly, that her passion is simply to help people read the Bible better.
A decade-long collaboration with our friends at BibleMesh has produced a platform for the learning of the biblical languages in the Spanish-speaking world. The Spanish version of this enterprise, developed under the care of Mesa Scholars, significantly improves upon its English-language progenitor. Simply put, it’s better in Spanish.
Gerardo Corpeño, PhD Wheaton, who spoke to this gathering last year in San Diego, leads his students in Guatemala along paths for approaching Christology that take Latin American realities into primary consideration.
Nathan Bills, ThD Duke, deploys his insatiable institutional and andragological curiosity as a key player in the emergence of Ghana’s Heritage Christian University as a leading West African institution.
Daniel Salinas, the leading scholar of the Latin American theological movement that has recently lost epoch-defining leaders like René Padilla, Mervin Breneman, and Samuel Escobar, attends to invitations from around the world where a Latin American experience of misión integral—wholistic mission—provides mile-markers, inspiration, and cautionary tales for thinkers and leaders inAsia and Africa.
Sergio Zapata, PhD Fuller Theological Seminary, brings a rigor to his work on the knowledge of God in diverse New Testament literatures that belies the notion that biblical and theological scholarship out of the Majority World honors lesser standards of excellence than elsewhere. Watch for Sergio in a forthcoming number of New Testament Studies.
I could go on.
We are, admittedly aspirationally, a cohort of missional scholars choosing to do hard things in under-resourced places. This is our peculiar vocation within the missio Dei.
And we are growing.
Eight years ago in this city, shivering our way towards any restaurant that didn’t require reservations, we were eight souls. Today we are forty-two. We don’t measure flourishing in numerical terms, but we take some comfort when others wish to join us.
I’m old enough to have seen tragic numbers of such people, doing hard things in under-resourced areas, become overwhelmed by needs and imposed duties and cease being scholars. They drop out of the Great Conversation that is embodied in places like ETS, IBR, SBL, and AAR. There is no longer any discovery in their work, only rehearsal and repetition. At Mesa Scholars, we are determined to break those cycles of loss and of settling.
I hope that the DNA shared by Mesa Scholars and Scholar Leaders is palpable. You could trace it even by the personnel. Prior to assuming the presidency of Scholar Leaders four years ago, Christopher Hays was a Mesa Scholar. For my part, I serve on the board of Scholar Leaders. In a moment, we’ll hear from Guillermo Velilla, who is both a Mesa Scholar and a Scholar Leader. His dual identity is hardly unique.
At Mesa Scholars, we focus more exclusively on the individual scholar making her contribution to the life and mission of the Partnered Theological Community in which she’s embedded. Scholar Leaders, too, seeks to empower its scholars for a lifetime of service, then drives beyond that focus and takes on major projects of an organizational, strategic, and global scope. We’ll hear from Christopher about some of those this evening.
We do what we do separately … and we do it together. So … this quite naturally co-sponsored evening for which you have joined us.
Now just a word about my co-host, Christopher Hays. We routinely ask ourselves how such a young punk can have accomplished so much in so few years. But for some people, Christopher is not young. He’s widely regarded as the most elderly human being on the planet to routinely practice the Gen-Z Stare.
It will not have escaped the attention of this audience that in the realm of biblical scholars, there is an excessive number of Christopher Hays-es. By which I mean that there are two.
There is Christopher B. Hays and then there is Christopher M. Hays. Ours is the M. It’s actually a matter of conjecture what the ‘M’ stands for. Christopher got through the entire presidential search process as well as the ritual hazing traditions at Scholar Leaders without having given up this secret.
Now David and Cathy Capes, the primary humans behind the highly regarded Exegetically Speaking and Stone Chapel podcasts, have organized an informal betting pool this evening in an attempt to get to the bottom of this mystery. What does the M stand for? You can place your bets in public view over at the bar or, for the squeamish, sneak an envelope into Cathy’s handbag.
But I digress…
It’s my pleasure to introduce a very fine friend, Guillermo Velilla. Guillermo is a Colombian Old Testament scholar finishing his work on the Septuagint of the Book of Exodus at Oxford after preparing for doctoral work at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia and Wheaton Graduate School. Guillermo is here in Boston with his wife Sandy and his daughter Amelia, though the two Velilla ladies—one of whom is very young—are not with us this evening. Guillermo is both a Mesa Scholar and a Scholar Leader. You’ll enjoy what he brings to us this evening.
A sermon preached at Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church, Wethersfield, Connecticut, USA
17 December 2023
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.
In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.
Luke 1.1-4 (ESV)
I have always felt different.
It’s OK, I muddle through. I’m not having a public crisis and I’m not about to reveal any un-Christmasy, awkward secrets from up here today.
But it’s true. I have always felt different.
In high school, I was the Christian kid on the basketball team, never at the parties and rarely at the dances. (That was probably a mercy for the art of dance.)
In retrospect, our Christian tradition kept me from falling into some of the life-twisting sins that mess up teenage lives. I’m grateful for that. But it also distanced me from my friends. Maybe unnecessarily.
I got good grades, but that wasn’t a thing that was valued so much in the little town where Pastor Scott and I grew up. In fact, a high grade didn’t really earn you any friends.
But I was competitive, so I didn’t like coming in second in a class. I would actually work hard to get the highest grade while making sure it wasn’t higher than it needed to be. It was a successful week when I could get the best grade of the class on the mid-term exam and not have it be more than, say, a 92. 94 gets icky. Don’t even talk to me about 97.
I was introverted and not good with girls. (Again, probably a mercy to the young women of our valley.)
But this business of feeling different wasn’t something that ended when I could finally grow a beard and pay taxes.
I still feel different. Maybe you do, too.
In terms of my vocation, my professional calling, I’m a biblical scholar. Can I share with you that for a person in my line of work, listening to sermons is an agony?
I sit there thinking, ‘Well, OK, but ….’ or ‘Wow, you sure bungled that one … ‘ or … ‘Really???’
I have nothing against pastors. I generally love them and spend the lion’s share of my life shaping new ones as biblical interpreters and human beings who I hope are worth following. I pray for Karen’s and my pastors and their wives every morning because I know something about how demanding their work is and how much they need God’s help if they’re to do it well.
In fact, if you were to ask me what I believe my primary spiritual gift to be, I’d tell you as I’ve told others: ‘I’m a pastor, and God for some reason has asked me to exercise that gifting mostly in academic communities’ … like the Biblical Seminary of Colombia where we serve in South America.
Now in recent years, God has spared me much of that sermon-listening agony. One of the reasons I love the privilege Karen and I have of belonging to our WEFC community is that we have such a high standard of preaching here. I’m constantly in awe of Scott’s careful way with a biblical text. And, I can say the very same thing about Pastor Samuel in our church in Colombia. Sammy is an excellent interpreter of the Bible and a genuine shepherd of souls. So the Lord has been gentle with my quirky calling and its complications.
But in general, listening to a sermon has for me always been somewhere between uncomfortable and painful; participating in a Bible Study is a matter of measuring my words and trying not to say the wrong thing or over-complicate a perfectly good conversation among our brothers and sisters.
Even responding to a theological question asked of me by one of my son’s college friends sitting in the back seat of my car, led to my Johnny turning around and saying to his friend with a smile on his face…
I just gotta’ warn you, my Dad always complicates everything…
You see, I’m different. And I’ve always known it.
But I’m not quite done yet with this little public confessional.
My calling has meant that I have spent most of my adult life in Latin America … doing work cross-culturally. Much as Karen and I love and are loved in our Colombian context, I will never be Colombian. I’ll never completely belong in that place that, as of this year, some of you from this church family now know. And when missionaries return to the country they came from… as some of you can attest … we never exactly fit back in. Living over there has changed us … made us different people.
And, if I can get really personal, I live here in Connecticut on my wife’s home turf. Karen is a local girl. She grew up in Hartford, Wethersfield, Cromwell. Now we live just across the river in Portland. We have this thing that happens to us in the car where we’re going somewhere and she forgets to tell me to turn right until the right turn is back there already. She figures I know where we’re going, but I don’t. I sometimes say to her in exasperation…
Karen, I’m not from here…
I love New England. Living back here is a return gift of something I renounced painfully when my family and I moved to Costa Rica as missionaries back in 1988 after four years in Massachusetts … But I love New England as an insider-outsider. I will never be a true New Englander, just as my family back in Millersburg, Pennsylvania, was never truly from there. That would take another two or three generations. And I don’t have’em!
So I am drawn to these first four verses of this third gospel, this Gospel of Luke. It’s tempting to think that Luke is just kind of clearing his throat in these early verses before getting on with the important stuff at verse 5.
But that would be a mistake. Luke has placed this little introduction here for a reason, and we ought to try to understand what that reason is. I think a close look at these verses will bring new light about the God of Christmas, the Jesus of Christmas, and even about us as we—joyfully, painfully?—celebrate Christmas together this year.
You see, Luke feels the need to justify adding a new report about Jesus. In his time, lots of them already exist.
Luke seems to want this Theophilus to understand both his motivation and his method for adding to the pile of memories and teaching about Jesus. In adding to earlier reports that have served Jesus’ followers and inquirers for a half century already, Luke feels that it’s important for Theophilus to understand why this new project is necessary and how it relates to the accumulation of testimonies and accounts about Jesus that is already a done deal … already available to him and to Theophilus.
I think what he says is important for us also. Let’s look carefully at what Luke writes at the beginning of his work:
First, Luke pays his respects to his forebears in the faith and in the chronicling of Jesus’ words and deeds. He respects them and he honors their testimony.
We see this most obviously in verse 2, where he uses two critical expressions to describe those who have gone before him in the task he himself has now set his hand to.
Let me read those first two verses
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnessesand ministers of the word have delivered them to us…
Luke 1.1-2 (ESV)
Luke kind of tips his hat to these eyewitnesses and these ministers of the word. They’re probably two overlapping groups: The eyewitnesses over here knew what they knew because they’d seen it with their own eyeballs. It was undeniable to them. They’d lived those events in flesh and blood.
And then, over here, there are those who took those testimonies and the teaching of Jesus and served the early Jesus movement as servants of the word.
I think these would have been two overlapping groups.
Not all the eyewitnesses would have had this kind of word-based ministry as their calling. Some of them would have been quiet, everyday believers living local lives of faithful service. And not all these ministers of the word would have been eyewitnesses. Some of them would have come along later and met Jesus in something other than an eyewitness way.
But there’d be an overlap: The apostle John writes like one of the overlap people at the beginning of that little letter that we call First John:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
1 John 1.1-4 (ESV)
Luke is saying to Theophilus, ‘Look, I stand on the shoulders of such people. Luke himself is not an eyewitness and in his double volume (Luke-Acts) he doesn’t style himself as a typical preacher or teacher of the word either.
Luke is repaying a debt here, and I think he does it with some tenderness and affection for the people he’s describing. His faith and the faith of people he cares about wouldn’t exist without this legacy. Luke acknowledges that right at the outset, the way you and I can speak with appreciation of the people who testified of Jesus to us and nurtured us in the faith, even if our lives have long since moved on from those formative moments.
But the second thing I notice in these first verses demands some patience on our part if we’re going to understand Luke: he finds the accumulated mountain of testimony and teaching about Jesus to be … how do I say this diplomatically…inadequate.
Now, let’s pay careful attention to what he’s saying.
He doesn’t say erroneous.
He doesn’t say superficial.
He doesn’t say misleading.
He doesn’t say obsolete.
What he says is something like this: ‘Look, Theophilus, I get you. We’re a little bit alike, you and I. We have this analytical bent about us. We need sequencing. We need order. We need logic. We need to understand the wiring behind the panel and how it works, not just whether the lights go on and the refrigerator keeps things cold and the Internet works.
And this legacy of testimony and teaching about Jesus doesn’t completely meet the need for people like you … and me. Admit it. You and I, we’re different. Not better, not worse. But different.
So here’s what I’ve done.’
Verses 3-4:
…(I)t seemed good to me also, having followed all thingscloselyfor some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.
Luke 1.3-4 ESV)
There are four critical expressions in what I’ve just read that explain Luke’s method. They shed light on what he brings to a table that’s already been abundantly served, on behalf of Theophilus:
…all things (πᾶσιν)
…for some time past (ESV) / from the first (NRSV) (ἄνωθεν)
…closely (α͗κριβῶς)
…orderly (καθεξῆς)
The first three of these expressions describe Luke’s research methods. The last one describes his published work.
His research:
‘All things’: exhaustive
‘From the first’: sequentially
‘Closely’: with attention to detail
His report:
‘Orderly’: in a way that speaks to your habits of reading/consideration/reflection/persuasion.
To what end: (4) that you might have certainty ( ἵνα ἐπιγνῶς: solid confidence, deep understanding) concerning the things you have been taught. Luke’s work doesn’t replace earlier testimony and teaching. Rather, it complements it. It bolsters it. Luke’s approach is a force multiplier in the discipling of Theophilus. It makes what already exists more adequate to Theophilus’ need.
It addresses Theophilus as the person God has created and ‘wired’ him to be without suggesting that he just get by on what works for most people. You see, Luke honors Theophilus, too. He doesn’t consider him a problem to be managed or an annoyance to be tolerated. He addresses him as ‘noble Theophilus’.
Now Luke is about to launch into his own unique retelling of the Christmas story, complete with all sorts of inside scoops that could only have come from him interviewing the people involved. He’s describing his careful method in these first four verses, but he will very soon put the results on display.
His account will very obviously aim at being exhaustive, sequential, detailed and orderly.
Can you see this? Luke’s gospel is a labor of love. That love reaches back to the eyewitnesses and ministers of the word whose shoulders Luke stands upon. And that same love reaches forward to Theophilus, whom Luke longs to see experience a mature certainty or confidence in his own life as a follower of Jesus.
Now there’s an open secret about Theophilus and this is probably the moment for telling it: We don’t have a clue who Theophilus is. It’s one of those names that has a meaning. It means ‘lover of God’ or ‘friend of God’.
Maybe this name belonged to a guy Luke knew and his research is meant to serve that friend. Theophilus is a masculine name, so it would have been a man, not a woman. Or maybe it’s a name that stands in for any lover of God who belongs to that minority of us who need to understand before we can believe and who need to have our hearts and minds well nourished if we’re going to continue to believe. Maybe Theophilus is not a man who lived and died twenty centuries ago … Maybe Theophilus is the 18% of us or whatever it is whose brains work in a way that requires this kind—Doctor Luke’s kind—of information.
In either case, Luke—by the insight of God’s Spirit—has seen Theophilus … has seen us. He has understood us. He has honored us. He has spoken our language, not asked us to just get by, by listening in.
When Luke moves on to talk about the incarnation of God in Jesus—the taking on of the human condition, the taking the form of a servant—he has demonstrated that same servant attitude by taking those of us into account who are different in this way.
The birth of Jesus is good news shaped and shape-able even for those of us who are different.
Even for Theophilus …
Even for Dave …
Perhaps even for you…
Now it may have caught your eye that I have not stopped this morning with Theophilus. The text I have quoted from in Luke in gets to Theophilus by verse 4.
But then, when Luke has finished his preface and launched into his account, there is a verse 5, a verse 6, and a verse 7.
Now Luke is no longer describing his own methodology, he’s already done with that by the end of verse 4. Now he’s telling Jesus’ story.
In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.
Luke 1.5-7 (ESV)
Look where Luke goes first with his fresh account of the story of Jesus. The first chapters of the gospel of Luke are full of the stuff, the content, of personal interviews.
How do we know this?
Well, he’s scooping inside details that were only known to individuals who were alone when the thing they experienced went down. One example is Zechariah’s visitation by the angel when he was ministering alone in the temple. Zechariah happened to be there according to the priestly schedule that assigned him to temple service in the precise moment when totally unexpected stuff begins to happen. Only one of the priests went into that holy space at a time. The door was shut, the people were waiting outside, and it just seemed like Zechariah was taking forever in there (1.21).
But the angel Gabriel’s confrontation of Zechariah, his commissioning of John the Baptist’s childless father into the center of the mission of God, his being struck dumb when he asked the angel for a guarantee, that all went down between Zechariah and this angelic Man of God (Gabriel).
It seems that Luke eventually interviewed Zechariah.
And then there’s Mary’s experience with her own angelic visitation, quoted so often in the Christmas season.
Nobody was around to record those stories except the human beings who experienced them. By telling Zechariah’s story and Mary’s story, and other people’s stories, Luke is adding to our population of ‘eyewitnesses’, as he’s already called such people in verse 2. As he does so—although I have no idea whether he would have thought of it this way—Luke is becoming more and more like those ‘ministers of the word’ that he mentions alongside the eyewitnesses.
But I want to go somewhere very specific with this.
As Luke tells the Christmas story, how does he identify the first interviewees he brings into his account? Let’s look one final time at verses 5-7:
5. In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. 6. And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. 7. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.
Luke 1.5-7 (ESV)
I imagine that Elizabeth gave Luke permission to disclose that last … really tender … potentially shameful detail. At least I hope he did. I don’t know what the protocols for such a thing were back then. Luke doesn’t just say ‘but they had no children’ and leave it at that. He locates the problem in Elizabeth’s body. Elizabethwas barren, he says.
As a result of this situation, Zechariah and Elizabeth are—like Theophilus but in a different way—people who are different.
I want to be careful as I describe this, because in a church family like ours infertility is without doubt the painful experience of at least some of us. It’s also one of those losses … in many cases the loss of a dream, the loss of something that was longed for but never possessed … that makes people feel different than their peers, especially in that season of life when their friends seem to be happily producing babies just when they cannot. Commonly, it’s an ache that lasts an entire lifetime.
Zechariah and Elizabeth know that pain. They’re aware that they are different, ‘that old couple with no kids’. And, like Theophilus, they are not left out when God’s redeeming love, made human in the Christ child, invades. They are seen, they are taken into account, they are brought into the story. In their case—unlike what some of us are asked to endure—they are healed, made whole, and gifted with a son.
Throughout this Christmas season, we have been singing that amazing song, O Come, All You Unfaithful. We’ll sing it again in a minute.
O come, all you unfaithful Come, weak and unstable Come, know you are not alone
O come, barren and waiting ones Weary of praying, come See what your God has done
Thanks to our brother Luke, we can now add to this description of those who are invited to come closer to Jesus in this season all of us who for whatever reason ‘have always felt different’. Like Theophilus, and like those of us who kind of are Theophilus. Or for any other reason.
For all of us, it’s time for us to come home.
If ‘feeling different’ in some way describes a burden you’ve carried, wouldn’t it be just like Jesus to draw you and your story into his embrace more tightly than you’ve ever known it. Even into this hospitable family, more fully than you’ve expected.
I began this sermon by breaking one of the cardinal rules of preaching: I talked about myself. Because you’re generally a patient bunch, let me end it in a similar way and let’s call this my testimony. I have breakfast regularly with Brian Hucks, our lead elder here at WEFC.
Because he’s an engineer and I’m a biblical scholar and we’re both guys, we always eat at the same place at the same hour. I always arrive four minutes late. We even sit at the same table, and we generally order the same breakfast we ordered a month ago. It’s just a little bit pathetic, but we like it that way.
Two breakfasts ago—as Brian and I measure time—something took the conversation to a point where I told Brian that, even at our beloved church and mostly because I spend half of each year or more somewhere else, I always feel like a bit of an outsider. I never learn enough of your names. I don’t know your stories. I’m somewhere else when big stuff happens here. I told Brian that I don’t feel as though I really belong yet.
Brian looked stunned. He didn’t interrupt me, probably because he was chewing and even two guys in flannel shirts try not to talk with our mouths full.
But when I gave him a chance he said, ‘Well that is certainly not how any of us sees you’ and he affirmed Karen’s and my belonging in this family.
It was a word from God for me.
It was an invitation to come home. It was like Luke saying to Theophilus, ‘Look, pal, we’ve got a place for you in this Jesus story, let me speak your language to you for a little bit.’
Wouldn’t it just like Jesus to come near to you as you remember the events of Jesus’ birth with this limping community of Jesus-followers?
O come, all you unfaithful Come, weak and unstable Come, know you are not alone
O come, barren and waiting ones Weary of praying, come See what your God has done
Christ is born, Christ is born Christ is born for you
O come, bitter and broken Come with fears unspoken Come, taste of His perfect love
O come, guilty and hiding ones There is no need to run See what your God has done
PRAYER
Our Father, we ask you to bring us all the way into your embrace. Please reduce the distance between us and you down to the vanishing point. Please reduce the distance between each other in that same way.
La bendición hermosamente equilibrada que se pone en boca de Aarón y sus hijos hasta donde alcanza la vista genealógica es notable por varios motivos.
En primer lugar, parece -al menos a los ojos del lector occidental- un claro en el bosque de lo que a veces puede parecer un bosque literario muy oscuro. De hecho, algunos críticos literarios encuentran la bendición aarónica tan profundamente disonante con su entorno que aventuran un origen para ella que está lejos de las prescripciones cultuales y arquitectónicas de su entorno.
Es posible que haya sido el ancla brillantemente pulida de alguna liturgia perdida, colocada aquí como una joya en un entorno que parece deslucido e incluso burdo en contraste. Otra posibilidad es que haya brillado tanto que los escritores de Israel hayan redactado una explicación etiológica incoherente de su gloria estética, que tal vez no esté a la altura del núcleo con el que empezaron.
Probablemente ambos tipos de teorías juzgan con demasiada dureza el material litúrgico de los pasajes circundantes. Igualmente, ambas miran con malos ojos lo que los estudiantes de la Torah han encontrado durante innumerables generaciones más convincente que oscuro, más digno que burdo. Por último, podría decirse que ambas explicaciones son intolerantes con la flexibilidad de género de la literatura antigua que está en nuestras manos al leerla.
En cualquier caso, es plausible que el escándalo que se presenta como entorno empobrecido para una joya brillante esté en función de nuestras propias limitaciones como lectores y no de rudas deficiencias del texto.
El Señor te bendiga…
Números 6:24 (LBLA)
Los sacerdotes de Israel declararán para siempre estas palabras sobre el pueblo, esperando contra toda esperanza que el Señor realmente escuche y esté dispuesto a actuar. Si estas palabras caen al suelo como un monólogo sacerdotal optimista o, en el mejor de los casos, como un diálogo unilateral entre adoradores, entonces se perderá algo más que una vocación religiosa que no salió bien.
Un pueblo, en efecto, perecerá.
Después de todo, uno de los grandes escritores sureños de Estados Unidos se atrevió a preguntar de forma tan memorable como si estuviera vivo hoy, ‘¿Dónde están los hititas?’
The bright and promissory nature of chapter 48 begins by rehearsing the sequence of warning-and-calamity that comprise ‘the former things’ (48.3) which the prophet now considers to lie behind Jacob/Israel while the horizon brightens just ahead. I discuss that retrospective view here.
The striking pivot towards the redemptive future that awaits is initiated at verse 6 by two principal means. First, the earlier and retrospective identifier the former things (הרשאנות) at 48.3 meets its counterpart in the prospective reference to new things (חדשות) at 48.6. It is critical to observe the degree to which both expressions are ‘empty’ identifiers; that is to say, they establish a sequence but their content must be provided by additional text and context. This does in fact occur, and so establishes a base of meaning that can travel with both identifiers into new and different contexts.
Second, the adverbial expression מעתה (from this time forward) establishes a new temporal baseline for the aforementioned new things. It states that these novelties in Jacob/Israel’s experienced will be announced now and from this point forward.
You have heard; now see all this; and will you not declare it? From this time forward I make you hear new things, hidden things that you have not known.
They are created now, not long ago; before today you have never heard of them, so that you could not say, ‘I already knew them.’
You have never heard, you have never known, from of old your ear has not been opened. For I knew that you would deal very treacherously, and that from birth you were called a rebel.
Isaiah 48:6-8 (NRSV, emphasis added)
There are a number of contrasts between the former things and the promised new things, some of which are obvious while others are less so. One that is often missed pertains to the prehistory of both elements. In the case of the former things, the text describes a long prehistory of warning that anticipated the actual, sudden calamity of Zion’s destruction and the people’s exile. By contrast, the new things that are here introduced are described as unimaginable. Jacob never saw them coming, indeed could not have been trusted to steward news of them appropriately. They were hidden from both humans and their idols, as we shall see. YHWH alone knew of them. YHWH alone creates them now.
Curiously, there is no suggestion here that the prophet Isaiah had known of them either. The smelting (48.10-11) and returning remnant motifs are of course embedded deeply in the eighth-century prophet’s words. Both of these presage a kind of future beyond the storm. Yet in chapter 48 detailed foreknowledge of the new things is not claimed on the prophet’s behalf, including the role to be played by the here unnamed Cyrus, whom YHWH loves, calls, and brings to Zion’s aid (48.14-15).
There is a touch of regret in YHWH’s address, yet he seems to lament a misfortune that has in any case now passed.
Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: I am the LORD your God, who teaches you for your own good, who leads you in the way you should go.
O that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your prosperity would have been like a river, and your success like the waves of the sea; your offspring would have been like the sand, and your descendants like its grains; their name would never be cut off or destroyed from before me.”
Isaiah 48:17-19 (NRSV)
This backward glance at the sad necessity of those former things is soon overcome by the summons to an unspecified plural audience energetically to proclaim ‘this’ to the end of the earth. Presumably ’this’ (זאת) alludes to the whole trajectory of YHWH’s engagement with Jacob/Israel, and most certainly the very recent news that YHWH ‘has redeemed his servant Jacob’—to the end of the earth. Declared as though an accomplished fact, it seems to indicate more precisely an imminent result of a decision that YHWH has taken. It is the unexpected agency of the unnamed Cyrus that renders YHWH’s new things not only sequentially new but also entirely unforeseeable.
On the strength of all this, the exiles are encouraged to…
A sermon preached at Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church, 18 July 2021
If you’re following the teaching given here over these last few weeks, you’ll know that we’re immersed in a sermon series on the ‘one another’ passages of the New Testament. There are many of them and we’re able to touch on a few.
It’s important for us to take on board that these ‘one another ‘passages—do this to or for each other—are about forming and nourishing health and unity within a community that we as followers of Jesus have committed to. For most of us, that community is Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church.
I’ve chosen to speak this morning on the instruction we receive from two apostles to ‘greet one another with a holy kiss’ or in one case ‘greet one another with a kiss of love’.
This may be the first sermon about kissing that you’ve ever heard. I assure you it’s the first one I’ve ever preached.
In fact, if you were to miss today’s sermon on kissing, it’s likely you’d have a thirty- or forty-year wait until the next one rolls around.
Here’s one of our five passages where this kissing instruction comes to us in the letters of the apostles who shaped and instructed the first Christian communities:
Finally, brothers, rejoice. Aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
2 Corinthians 13.11-14
Now the fact that you’ve probably never heard a sermon about kissing and the fact that I’ve never before preached one doesn’t mean that the apostles had little or nothing to say about kissing. On the contrary, the text I’ve just read is just one of five that are like it. Nearly word for word like it.
The Apostle Paul writes the same instruction at the end of four different letters, each one identical with the others: Greet one another with a holy kiss.
Peter also weighs in on the topic of kissing, although his expression is a little different. He says Greet one another with a kiss of love.
Each time, this summons to kissing comes near the end of a letter when the apostle is wrapping things up. Every single one of these Kiss Commands comes in the context of lots of other greetings. For example, have a listen of how absolutely social the apostle Paul is sounding as he makes his way to the end of his long letter to the Romans.
Rom. 16:3 Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, 4 who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks but all the churches of the Gentiles give thanks as well. 5 Greet also the church in their house. Greet my beloved Epaenetus, who was the first convert to Christ in Asia. 6 Greet Mary, who has worked hard for you. 7 Greet Andronicus and Junia,3 my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners. They are well known to the apostles, and they were in Christ before me. 8 Greet Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord. 9 Greet Urbanus, our fellow worker in Christ, and my beloved Stachys. 10 Greet Apelles, who is approved in Christ. Greet those who belong to the family of Aristobulus. 11 Greet my kinsman Herodion. Greet those in the Lord who belong to the family of Narcissus. 12 Greet those workers in the Lord, Tryphaena and Tryphosa. Greet the beloved Persis, who has worked hard in the Lord. 13 Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord; also his mother, who has been a mother to me as well. 14 Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brothers5 who are with them. 15Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints who are with them. 16Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ greet you.
Romans 16.3-16
You get the picture, right? There is something very important for Paul in each community’s web of connections with other communities and other Christians and with Paul himself.
Whatever this Holy Kiss is about, it has something to do with being consciously connected with other Christians. This is not just about your spiritual health or mine.
We could put it another way: The order to greet each other with a Holy Kiss only makes sense if we are Jesus-People-in-Community.
So let’s start by recognizing that.
In fact, let’s stick a pin in that and give it a name. Let’s make it a first declaration this morning:
Holy Kissing is for connected people.
Here’s a second truth: Kissing is intimate.
I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to talk about this in public. It’s not a topic that’s natural to me. But I think I probably have to say one or two things about it, so here we go…
For starters … this could get awkward fast … there are a lot of ways to kiss somebody.
But every one of them is in some way intimate.
Just to declare the obvious, you can’t really kiss more than one person at a time. Faces aren’t big enough for that. So there’s already intimacy in the simple fact that kissing is a one-on-one enterprise.
But we can say more about the intimacy that’s native to kissing.
You can’t kiss from a distance.
You’re exposing your moist lips in close contact with another person’s similarly moist lips … or at least their face. Unless you’re blowing a kiss … which is really just a kind of theatrical imitation of a real kiss … you’re getting very close to the person you’re kissing. If they have a scent or a smell, it comes into your nose. It’s inevitable because you’re that close. You’re momentarily that intimate. If they’re sick, you’ll get what they have. If they sneeze at the wrong time, it’ll be all over you. Depending on the kind of kiss, you may even taste the other person as well as smell them. If they have hair, it may brush your eyes.
Do you see what I mean? Kissing is inevitably intimate, will you grant me that?
So Paul, who is distant from people he cares about, spends a lot of time sending greetings, because he’s not close enough to kiss them and sometimes he’s in prison. But when he turns to the inside of a community—whether at Corinth or Rome or Thessalonica—he says, ‘Look, you guys can get close. I don’t have that privilege. So, you guys, when you gather, greet each other with a kiss.
He’s commanding a kind of intimacy within the Christian community that he’s just spent a lot of ink instructing how to live together and how to live on mission. And he does it over and over again. Something about this practice … this social ritual … this discipline … this kiss … seems to be really important to Paul.
Holy Kissing is for connected people …
…and….
Kissing is intimate.
But it would be a terrible thing to stop here.
Think about this with me: all kinds of wild and crazy communities could applaud this instruction if what we’ve looked at so far were all Paul was saying … and in some cases they’d be very far from being Christian communities.
There’s one very important … consistently recurring … feature of Paul’s instruction that we haven’t talked about yet. Can you sense what it is?
Paul says, ‘Greet one another with a holy kiss.’
In recent weeks, I’ve worked hard to understand what Paul means by adding the adjective holy to the noun kiss. He does this in all four of his exhortations to community kissing, so it can’t be a casual or mindless move. He has something very important in mind.
Otherwise, his command would be to greet each other by kissing instead of greet one another with a holy kiss.
I believe his point in consistently calling for a holy kiss is community-building restraint.
I did say, did I not, that this kiss is not about your or my pleasure or spiritual health?
A holy kiss is intimacy within limits. There’s a time for kissing without limits, as there is a moment for intimacy without limits. Our own bodies and urges and passions, the way God created us to be, lead us in this direction. And if we need biblical guidance on this, the very sensual book called Song of Solomon makes clear that God values passionate love between a husband and a wife, even urges it, even delights in it. He created the thing, after all. He knows what he’s talking about.
But the holy kiss that communicates greeting … welcome … in a community of Jesus followers enacts intimacy within limits.
It welcomes. It is a way of ‘seeing’ the person who arrives at the door of the community or of the community’s gathering. It makes eye contact and then it makes lip contact or at least cheek contact (the ‘Air Kiss’) or at least feigned cheek contact (the ‘Air Kiss Plus’).
I remember the awkward thrill when I moved to Costa Rica with a young family in 1988 and learned that in that culture a man always greets a woman with a kiss. But I was instructed that you don’t actually let your lips touch a woman’s cheek unless you know her very well or are family with her.
Instead, you touch cheeks and you kiss the air, like this.
Then—a little later I learned the shades and nuances of this kind of kissed greeting. I learned to do what I’m going to demonstrate here. In fact, I became quite an expert at it … I fancied myself the Rocky Balboa of the Air Kiss Plus.
[Demonstrate the Air Kiss +]
Do you see what I did there? I didn’t actually touch the woman’s cheek, nor did my hand actually touch her shoulder. Both of those things almost happened, but they didn’t really happen. It is the Goldilocks Moment in Costa Rican kissed greetings. And, among expats in Costa Rica, I considered myself a bit of a rock star for getting it just right.
I was an absolutely amazing Almost Kisser.
The woman felt properly greeted. I felt like the world’s best holy kisser. And no boundaries had been crossed.
It was awesome.
This is not too far, I think, from what Paul means when he insists that in the communities that look to him for apostolic leadership, we greet each other with a holy kiss. I think Peter’s community, which is instructed to greet each other with a kiss of love, would have been practicing the same community-building intimacy with restraint.
Can you begin to imagine how this works?
When we come together as God’s New Israel, as his little flock, as Jesus’ community, we don’t just let people find their way in and take a seat, literally or figuratively. We notice them. We see them. In Paul’s and Peter’s day, we kiss them.
The holy kiss notices … offers intimacy … with the kind of restraint that builds community.
The intimacy is important. The restraint is important. And, together, both create and construct a community where Jesus is Lord and people are at home.
Let’s work towards some concrete take-aways:
As a dude, I wouldn’t welcome a new couple into my Community Group, discover that Mr. Smith works at Pratt and Mrs. Smith is a stay-at-home wife and mother, and then invite Mrs. Smith to go whale watching while Mr. Smith is at work. It wouldn’t be appropriate, mainly because it wouldn’t build community. It might be intimate. But it would be divisive. It would be weird. It wouldn’t be holy in the way that a holy kiss is holy. It would be intimacy without the community-nourishing limits.
A holy kiss nourishes intimacy and builds community. It is both one-on-one and broadly social. It is both intimate and public (observable).
Let me take a little bit of a detour:
I’ve noticed over the years that guys, in particular, begin to do two things when they come into Christian faith and Christian community. They begin to sing. And they start to hug.
Both would have been awkward and alien for most guys before Jesus became their Lord. Both are a little bit out there. A little bit alien. Yet Christian guys begin to do both.
I think this is very close to what Paul is getting at with his instructions about greeting with a holy kiss. We are invited to get out there a little and sing … and hug. But we do so in ways that are public and restrained because we’re building community.
We hardly need to be asked to do this. We just do it. It’s natural. It’s good. It’s holy.
So … how come we don’t kiss each other today?
I don’t think it’s because we don’t see each other, although in a Western, individualistic culture, we must always be aware of that tendency. By default, we do make all things about my or your individual convenience or pleasure or spiritual health.
So why don’t we kiss?
Well, most of us are products of a culture that is not overly tactile … touch-oriented. We place a very high value on independence … on personal space.
Somehow, perhaps also in part because we live in an overly sexualized environment, we’ve decided (without really consciously deciding) that a kiss would not build community. It would be weird.
There’s some value in pausing to think about this. Contrary to what some Christians claim, we don’t just read our Bibles literally and go do what the Bible says. People who imagine that this kind of literal reading and implementation of what we’ve read is Christian obedience have not yet thought hard enough. We’re far more selective than that. We pass everything we find in the Bible through a couple of prisms before we act. And we should. We must.
One of those prisms is culture. Culture doesn’t get the final word, but it gets a word. I’m not sure God is concerned that we begin right now to flaunt our cultural norms and begin kissing each other as we gather together.
But if we’re not going to start kissing each other as our standard greeting, how do we submit obediently to this apostolic instruction?
Here are some practical ways in which I think we practice this odd apostolic instruction.
We greet intentionally and verbally.
We touch.
We make unhurried eye contact.
We learn each other’s names and we use them.
We shake hands. (There’s more than one way to do this. Personally, I love the firm handshake with the forearm twist … or the shoulder-squeeze twist.)
We hug.
We ask questions and listen for the answer.
That is to say, we construct Christian community by practicing both intimacy and restraint.
What we do not do … what we must stop doing if it’s become our habit … is to wander in and out with our eyes down, our hands in our pockets, and our hearts playing defense.
We must not do that.
There is room for introverts and extroverts in this practice of Christian greeting. There is space both for the Natural Hugger and the Reserved. But there is no room for untended fear or enmity or distance.
We must open up. We must, figuratively if not literally, learn to kiss one another … in holiness and with all due restraint but also with an openness to the crazy-good new things that happen when we begin to pay attention … to make eye contact … to embrace the other … to become family … to get outside ourselves and care more for the interests of the other than for our own.
When we do this, we’re not merely being nice. We are practicing the same hospitality with which Jesus welcomes us into his company. Into his embrace.
So, if I may: Brothers and sisters … sons and daughters of the living God … servants of our Lord Jesus Christ … spiritual family … Greet one another. Greet one another with a kiss. Greet one another with a holy kiss.
Thus ends the first sermon on kissing that you have likely ever heard.
May our Lord make us family.
Benediction
2 Corinthians 13:14 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
Questions for Community Groups
How do you express appropriate intimacy when you greet someone in our Christian community?
In the light of the instruction to greet one another with a holy kiss, how do we currently err on the side of being too reserved?
Are you aware of any practices in our community or in another where we err on the side of unrestrainedintimacy in greeting or welcoming?
What kind of welcome in our cultural context would communicate that ‘this is a place where Jesus is Lord and you are at home’?
We sat differently at breakfast this morning in this new old house, this Connecticut experiment, this place in the woods.
Our muscles still ached just a bit from yesterday’s load of furniture moved in and pushed around, aided by generous friends as the snow came down in earnest. Now to reap the fruit of our labors.
We perched on a new bench stationed on the side of the table that allows us to peer out over our backyard and into the woods from the rectangle off the kitchen that has now become The Breakfast Room.
The trees are winter-resplendent in their uncomplaining bearing up of two inches of snow, a mere sprinkling for New Englanders but remarkable enough to draw grateful eyes to the beauty of it all. You can see through the woods this time of year, an unveiling of fauna that must have our animals on their toes, or should. I remarked that if any animals moved about in those woods this morning, we’d spot them easily against the white upturning on the other valleyside of our fair-weather stream.
No cameras were at hand, but if this ain’t the spittin’ image.
It was an observation, not an expectation.
Yet not a minute later something moved. I grabbed the nearby binoculars and spotted a nice-sized coyote making his way slowly, right to left across the woods just beyond our rock wall, unaware of our admiration. No, two! No, three coyotes shuffling along from somewhere to somewhere, wild and beautiful!
They looked like German Shepherds, and were about that size. If one didn’t know better, you might even hear ‘Wolves!’ ring out in our amazement. But we do know better.
These were the coyotes who made short work of poor Morris the Deer, cleaning up his body to leave a med-school laboratory’s worth of pristine skeleton, then days later leaving no trace even of bone, just scattered fur here and there as mute testimony to Morris’ majestic life and inglorious death.
It’s amazing to me that from the inside warmth of this house, we become spectators of a wildness that moves the soul on a winter’s morning, hinting at other and deeper wildnesses that haunt this neighborhood, this state, this planet.
Who would have thought it when we said our tearful goodbyes to that other old house out in Indiana and came to this old house in New England’s generous woods?
Claramente una reflexión sobre la narrativa de la creación del Génesis 1, el ‘salmo del aleluya’ que está enumerado como el 148 del salterio trae toda la creación en su vórtice doxológico.
Tal como es costumbre en la alabanza bíblica, el salmo deconstruye las mitologías reinantes que se muestran como representaciones incuestionables de la realidad. El sol, la luna y las estrellas, por ejemplo, no están simplemente despojados de su presunto poder sobre los seres humanos. Eso ya se ha logrado en Génesis 1. Aquí, el asunto va un paso más allá: se unen en la alabanza a YHWH, y esto debido a un motivo interesante: “porque él mandó y fueron creados”.
Ya no hay poderes que temer, escudriñar y manipular, ahora los cuerpos celestiales ocupan su lugar en la congregación de los adoradores, junto a los hijos e hijas de Israel.
¡Aleluya! ¡Alabado sea el Señor!
Alaben al Señor desde los cielos, alábenlo desde las alturas. Alábenlo, todos sus ángeles, alábenlo, todos sus ejércitos. Alábenlo, sol y luna, alábenlo, estrellas luminosas. Alábenlo ustedes, altísimos cielos, y ustedes, las aguas que están sobre los cielos. Sea alabado el nombre del Señor, porque él dio una orden y todo fue creado. Todo quedó afirmado para siempre; emitió un decreto que no será abolido.
(Salmo 148:1-6 NVI)
Desconozco alguna construcción similar, en la que los seres y objetos creados más potentes se entreguen a la doxología agradecida por el simple hecho de haber sido creados soberanamente. Es un acto supremo de reconfiguración, aunque no de humillación. Los cuerpos celestiales se unen a la “hueste celestial” angélica más personal, al ser ubicados firmemente en el lado creado de la bifurcación de la creación del Creador. No representan para YHWH ninguna competencia en el departamento de la soberanía. Por el contrario, lo alaban tan fuerte como cualquier otro de la multitud reunida.
El punto de la unicidad de YHWH es nuevamente traído a colación cerca de la conclusión del salmo. Tomando un lenguaje que es común tanto a Isaías como a los salmos, el poema se complace explícitamente en el dialecto monoteísta:
Alaben el nombre del Señor, porque solo su nombre es excelso; su esplendor está por encima de la tierra y de los cielos. ¡Él ha dado poder a su pueblo! ¡A él sea la alabanza de todos sus fieles, de los hijos de Israel, su pueblo cercano! ¡Aleluya! ¡Alabado sea el Señor!
(Salmo 148:13-14 NVI)
Así que el monoteísmo bíblico toma forma en el contexto de la adoración. Rara vez se expresa prosaicamente o incluso teóricamente. Más bien la poesía y la alabanza reconocen el lugar único de YHWH como el único ser digno de adoración, el único poder al que todos los demás voluntariamente se inclinan, el único que se contrapone a la creación.
El aleluya, en un mundo así, se convierte en la palabra más digna. Sólo ella es capaz de ordenar a la creación con precisión. Se convierte en el contexto doxológico en el que el ser encuentra su significado.
Incluso el sol, la luna y las estrellas lo dicen, y con alegría.
A sermon preached at the Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church
22 November 2022
We don’t often think of hope as a thing to be endured.
Received, maybe. You can receive hope from the hands of an encourager.
Exercised, yes, I can see that. You can rise up on your hind legs in the midst of difficulty and exercise hope even when circumstances aren’t making much of a contribution to fostering it.
But endured? Is hope really a thing to be endured.
Well, somehow, hope endured has come to be the title of our Missions Emphasis Month here at Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church in this Year of Covid-19. Although it’s the first half of this sermon’s title, I didn’t invent the phrase … hope endured. Pastor Scott tells me he had nothing to do with it either. Frankly, I don’t know where it comes from. Yet hope endured fits what God has laid on my heart for this morning. It fits like a glove.
When I saw it I thought to myself that It’s a Festivus miracle, as some of you old Seinfelders might also be tempted to intone.
And, in fact, I think it is a small but precious miracle. Because, as one of your missionaries and maybe even on behalf of others of us, I want to talk to you about hope that we endure.
I’m not talking about hope that is always happy hope … not mindless optimism. But rather an empowering, resilient hope that brings with it a whole package of pain, brings with it the challenge to endure what our Maker is doing when we might have preferred a different path, hope that unmakes us and then recreates us as we submit to it. Hope endured.
It may or may not surprise you that there are not many missionaries in the story I want us to consider this morning. On a Missions Emphasis month, with a missionary speaker, aren’t there supposed to be lots of missionaries? Well, we’re in this story, but it’s not a story about us.
Yet there is a mission. It’s not our mission. It’s what many today are capturing with the expression the mission of God. Or if you want to dress it up a little, you might call it, as some do, the missio Dei. The mission of God.
Now, to be specific, I want to talk this morning about three things under the umbrella of hope endured:
First of all, I want to talk about our Creator’s end game: God blesses. That might sound like bumper-sticker frothiness, but I have in mind something much more sober and purposeful and redemptive than that.
Second, we’ll see where a human being is for the first time drawn explicitly into the mission of God to bless all nations in spite of the chaos that reigned even in his remote moment in the ancient world. At the beginning of the twelfth chapter of the book of Genesis—the Bible’s very first book—a total nothingburger of a man named Abram is called to initiate humankind’s conscious participation in the mission of God. We know that man as Abraham, and it’s right to think of him as our father.
Finally, I want to make what might sound to you like the absurd claim that history—even the tiny fragment of it we call ‘2020’—is right on track … that the mission of God is right on track. That’s a case that won’t be easy for me to make.
In all of this, I hope that we’ll end up with a clarified vision of hope endured. And be prepared to lean into that hope, no matter the personal cost it might ask of us.
The Creator’s End Game: God Blesses
Do you understand that God is on a mission to see all the peoples of the earth enjoy the deep blessing that comes from knowing and serving him … from living gratefully under his care? The Bible has a word for that … it calls that blessing shalom. It’s a word that prods at the joy and satisfaction that human beings experience when things are as they should be, when everyone has enough, when people live transparently in life-giving relationship with God and with each other, when hands cannot keep themselves from lifting up in gratitude for all that has been received.
God will have that outcome. He’ll have that shalom for all nations. He’ll never sacrifice that divine purpose.
He has a name, this God. He invites us to call him Yahweh, which means ‘the One who makes himself powerfully present’ or, more informally, ‘the One who keeps showing up’.
Before we even know his name, we find him in the Bible’s account of beginnings, of first things.
I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this, but those early chapters of our book of Genesis, where we learn about beginnings … the why and the who and the what for of them in particular… were not written in a vacuum. No, those first pages of our Bible were inked in a time when all peoples had their own stories of beginnings.
In those stories, the gods create in order to exploit … in order to employ … in order to use … in order to abuse. In a context like that, the Bible’s story of beginnings is a minority report. It is a version of events that is best described in a phrase I’ll borrow from my late father, who would sometimes say: ‘Them’s fightin’ words’.
The Bible’s account of beginnings gets up in the face of those existing tales of how the world came to be and says to the custodians of all other origins stories, ‘No, that’s just wrong!’ For starters, there is only one God. He made everything noble and good and beautiful, if you want to know more.
And you know what he does as soon as he makes … as soon as he creates?
He blesses!
Gen. 1:20 And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” 21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”
Gen. 1:27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
Gen. 1:28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Gen. 2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
This is the first thing the Bible teaches us about the God it labors to present to us. And this determination to bless lines up with everything else we learn about him in its pages. This is who he is! The other gods, this Genesis story cries out, are not like this God. When they act, they do so for their own selfish and corrupt reasons. When this God creates, he does so in order to bless.
That’s a whole different universe.
Them’s fightin’ words … They’re a way of declaring that the God of Israel, the God of the Bible, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not like other gods. He is good and generous and purposeful. He blesses. This is the first thing we learn about God in Scripture. It may be the most important thing we can know about him.
Genesis rumbles on, as you know, and soon we learn that …
God is on a mission … so, therefore is Abraham … and, in consequence, so are we.
But as we learn this, we also learn that blessing is never easy. Nor is the hope that believes and insists and proclaims that God is like this. Hope, which in a shattered world leads to eventual blessing, is always something to be endured.
The Lord’s intention to bless eventually drew his gaze to this Abram guy, who would in the most outrageous way imaginable become the father of all who would put their trust in Yahweh, in the God who showed up when Abram had no reason to expect Him.
In those first verses of Genesis 12, Yahweh brings Abraham into his own mission to bless the nations. Yahweh asks Abraham to abandon all that he knew and all that he was and to follow the direction of Yahweh’s invasion of his life into a place and a future and a mission that would only become clear in time:
Gen. 12:1 Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Do you see how the Lord’s command peels the layers of Abram’s identity as though peeling an onion? ESV: your country … your kindred … your father’s house. These are the three primary loyalties… primal identify markers of a man in the ancient world. You didn’t carry a passport back then. But you knew where you belonged.
It’s an order that some of us who have been called to be missionaries can understand a little bit from the inside.
More importantly, and for all of us, it was for Abraham and it is for all his sons and daughters a blessing to be endured.
Don’t miss the effect that Abraham’s obedience will have on the world as he joins himself to the mission of God:
3. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Scholars puzzle over that last phrase … and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. They ask themselves, how is that to happen? What is the role of those families who find blessing in Abraham?
The best of them, in my judgment, see in this promise the active and conscious identification of those families of the earth with Abraham and his offspring. That is, these families of the earth opt in to Abraham’s chosenness in some way. They join with Abraham in participating in what Yahweh is doing in his world and so find the Lord’s blessing.
In this first book of the Bible, we begin to glimpse a Creator who is passionately committed to blessing his world. In fact, blessing his world is the God of the Bible’s end game. The Bible begins on this note. If you know the New Testament book of Revelation, you know that it ends on this note as well.
Simply put, it is the Creator’s end game.
And, at the same time, this God who keeps showing up is mysteriously committed to the fact that the spread of such blessing will require sacrifice … trust … a measure of pain … and supernatural endurance. The hope of this blessing is in fact a hope to be endured.
Think about Jesus.
Jesus is the person in whom we see the face of our Maker most clearly. It is in Jesus that the God of Abraham, intent on blessing all nations, becomes one of us and invites us to come closer than human beings have ever been allowed to approach a Holy God.
Yet Jesus instructs us that ‘in this world you will have lots of tribulation’. He himself dies the most shameful imaginable death before being raised as the one who has overcome death and gives us the sure hope of accomplishing the same.
Jesus invites us to walk with him in the path of a hope endured.
We’re right on track.
Now this is where I’ll lose some of you. Especially because it’s 2020…
That’s understandable. We who have for several generations grown accustomed to a life that is safe and reasonably secure have been yanked in with the rest of humanity to a place where things do not feel safe. Life does not seem secure.
In the shock of it all, we’ve not only been rattled. We’ve become pessimists.
We lose our grip on a hope that is to be endured. This is natural, I think, when an historical moment goes a little thin on the reasons for hope that it’s offering up. Natural, perhaps. But not necessary. And not obedient.
To become a pessimist about God’s purpose with his world is one way of abandoning the faith. It’s the most common way that self-defined ‘practical people’ say ‘I’m done.’
I think our problem is one of timing. The mission of God rolls along its path on a different schedule than the one we follow in our short, little, fragile lives. A thousand years for us is for the mission of God a mere moment. Its stately pace feels to us like a total stall. Or a failed project. Or a pious dream that once animated us, but now not so much.
You see, no single generation, no lifetime, no portion of our customary timetable lasts long enough for us to gain accurate perspective on what is really happening.
Let me put it a different way: if our Maker had not disclosed to us orientation … instruction that flows from a different time frame, we’d have no idea of what is actually going on. We’d see little evidence of God’s determination to bless. We’d hunker down. We’d act as if this moment is the most important moment, the only moment, the determinative moment. We’d take our clues exclusively from right now. We’d conclude that the sky is falling. In our despair, we’d turn against each other over matters that are important, but not of first importance. We’d divide.
We’d be like a family on a long camping trip that pitches one of those big, sturdy, family tents to spend the night. In the middle of that night, a windstorm come ups and buffets that tent with what feels like unendurable violence.
In the panic of the moment, some would yell ‘Lean right!’ while others would scream ‘No, lean left!’. Some would order, ‘Everybody out of the tent!’, Others would say ‘Every stay right where you are!’, while others would run around in circles crying ‘We’re all gonna’ die!’
We’d have no perspective and very little way of knowing who was right and who was wrong and what is happening to us.
You see, we’re stuck in a dilemma: Without orientation, without instruction, no generation, no lifetime lasts long enough to get us up to a vantage point where we can see the whole story … the entire woods beyond the trees … the big picture.
So may I ask you for a special favor this morning?
Will you lower your defenses this morning and allow me to speak to you from the heart as a missionary whose particular calling has been to spend most of his growed-up years (again, as my Dad would have put it) in places where life has not been safe and not been secure…
May I?
May I not talk about missionaries today, opting instead to speak to you as one of your missionaries?
This is where we are. We’re stuck in that tent in this windstorm that has come upon us. And, you know what? This particular storm may give way to a beautiful, bright, calm, life-giving dawn. Or it may end very, very badly.
I don’t know.
But, like you, I have access to orientation from outside this moment … from outside this disturbing bubble in which we find ourselves. That orientation … that instruction … tells me that hope is to be endured. It informs me that the God who made this world and loves it more than we do is on a mission. It assures me that he will bring that mission to its conclusion in the blessing of all nations … all the families of the earth.
And, as one of your missionaries, I have a map inside my head. It spread itself out in there many years ago and it won’t go away. I see that map nearly every day. I can’t help myself.
It’s one of those maps that walks you through history in a visual way.
I see Abraham under his little tree, unpromising as any man or woman who ever lived (‘Our father worshiped idols beyond the river…’[Joshua 24.2]). I see Israel on its little sliver of land, promised … then occupied … then lost … then restored … then lost…
I see a little knot of Jesus-followers, mostly confined to an otherwise unimportant city called Jerusalem. They are meaningless, almost too few to count.
But I also see the spreading boundaries of their hope as it invades and eventually conquers the empire in which their hope was born. Because I am a child of the Western world, I see the blessing of the gospel they carry—their apostles carry it, their merchants bear it, their refugees encourage each other with the truth of it as they go—I see that blessing spread up through pagan Europe and into the British Isles.
As it goes—and, to be candid, it goes very slowly—it not only brings people into joyous relationship with their Maker. It also undermines and then reconstructs pagan societies into nations where the widow, the orphan, the slave, the poor, the sick have some hope of rescue and restoration. Places where there are hospitals and schools, places where infanticide becomes frowned on, places where the aged are not sent out into the cold to die alone, places where human beings are considered to manifest the very image and likeness of God and so not be expendable when they’re no longer economic producers.
My map keeps speaking to me. It shows me this blessing spreading across the Atlantic to this land that has given many of us birth and which all of us love. It is not an unmixed blessing. In the process, Native Americans lose their land and cotton fields become filled with African-born slaves.
But somehow hope endures, and even those slaves sing of Zion. They give us their negro spirituals and teach us that hope endures longer than the slaveowner’s whip.
My map won’t stop.
I entered a Zoom teleconference the Thursday before last, one in which I’d been asked to speak about the mission of God in and from the Old Testament. As I obediently logged on as I’d been instructed a quarter of an hour before our start time, my screen filled with fifteen faces of my Colombian students whose lives the blessing of God has joined to my own. They represent the leadership of something called the Medellín Ministerial Institute, a service of our Seminary to Christian leaders across our South American city of four million souls. Then, as the top of the hour approached, dozens and dozens of Latin American participants—all of them agents of God’s blessing in a country that has known unending political violence—clicked on to spend the evening savoring the wisdom of the God of Israel, known to us in Jesus Christ.
I thought to myself, that map still in my head, still speaking…
This is a scene of blessing endured.
This is a scene about which Israel’s prophets could only dream and Israel’s worshippers could only sing in hope.
This is the evidence that God remains on mission, determined to bless all nations and to bring history to its climax not in ashes but in glory.
None of this is easy. My beloved Colombian friends will likely not in their lifetimes see the end of the widow’s cry or the murder of the innocent by power-hungry men and women. Yet they will endure. They will be participants in the mission of God. The Lord’s blessing, through them, will triumph. Andrés Bedoya, one of my favorite students, was five years old when the paramilitaries who ruled his neighborhood murdered his father in front of the Seminary and threw his body against its gates to demonstrate what happens when uppity pastors instruct their people to follow God’s ways rather than man’s. Now Andrés is one of those pastors.
My map won’t stop speaking.
I see you this morning, bringing your fears and your grief and your troubled spirits and your hope into this place to learn, as the ancient prophets said that we non-Jews would, from the word of Israel’s God. This is all impossible unless God has done it, you see. There is no other explanation for why a little tribe of Hebrews and their crucified messiah should still command our attention today, still capture our hearts, still welcome us—like grafted-in branches—into their life under God.
This is insurmountable evidence that God has been here … still is here … abides with us and we with him.
It is evidence of hope endured.
It’s also testimony to another reality, one that I think is impossible to deny: The mission of God is right on track, his determination to bless undiminished, his presence among us as powerful and life-giving as ever, even in this awful year when we struggle to see beyond our fears of what is happening to us with COVID and with political differences that shout that they are more basic, more fundamental, more defining than our shared identity in Christ.
I hope that you can see that I’m not making some mindless, utopian claim here that things cannot lurch in horrible directions in any given historical moment. Indeed, they can. And they may.
Rather, as a missionary sent to Colombiafrom this church and a handful of others like it, I want to speak to you, our sending church, in Jesus’ name and by the authority of his gospel:
Take courage. Be at peace. Dare to find your primal identity in Christ. Taste and see that the Lord is good. No matter what happens to us in this unsettling moment of time in which it is our calling to live, find his grace to be sufficient.
Then love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and strength … and your neighbor as yourself.
Si Paul Simon solo pudo encontrar cinco formas para dejar a su amante, el escritor de Salmos 119 claramente le supera. Versículo tras versículo de este poema acróstico –significa que la primera letra de cada línea sigue al alfabeto en un patrón claramente identificable– enaltece la palabra, la ley y la promesa del Señor con un lenguaje usualmente utilizado solo para elogiar el amor romántico.
Me regocijo en tu palabracomo quien halla un gran botín.
(Salmo 119:162 LBLA)
Aunque las líneas específicas de este salmo audazmente enfocado han encontrado su camino a la espiritualidad judía y cristiana, para muchos lectores modernos el salmo mismo parece ser tedioso y—me atrevo a decirlo—un poco obsesivo. Un poema como este da primacía a la forma y luego a su contenido. Incluso un lector compresivo tiende a concluir, cuando ve al escritor llegar a la quinta línea que empieza con la letra “ayin”, que debe darse un descanso.
Sin embargo, vale la pena sujetar la impaciencia moderna con forma, repetición y ley, lo suficiente como para preguntar qué tipo de alma genera una celebración épica de la instrucción divina. ¿Quién, por ejemplo, podría decir esto sin una sonrisa burlona?
Tus testimonios he tomado como herencia para siempre, porque son el gozo de mi corazón.
¿Quién, sin ironía, afirma esto?
Quebrantada está mi alma anhelando tus ordenanzas en todo tiempo.
Algunos aspectos de dicho perfil vienen a mi mente.
Primero, el escritor está profundamente consciente de su propia fragilidad. Él habita en un mundo donde abundan la amenaza y la traición, uno donde sus pies parecen resbalar al menos que pueda situarlos firmemente en los cimientos de la instrucción divina.
En segundo lugar, él cree que YHWH crea y sostiene el mundo. La palabra del Señor para él es un subconjunto de su proyecto de sustento del mundo. El caos y el orden no son teóricos para él, sino más bien las articulaciones de su existencia diaria.
Tercero, él encuentra en la instrucción de YHWH como dadora de vida. Una y otra vez, contrapone una petición por la instrucción vivificante del Señor ante la desintegración de la vida y la esperanza.
Cuarto, él ha encontrado rica recompensa al dedicar una energía formidable al dominio de los prefectos de YHWH. Su enfoque a ese conjunto de aprendizaje que él cataloga como preceptos, ley(es), promesa y palabra(s) es todo menos pasivo. Él enérgicamente busca su recompensa y las anhela cuando parecen distantes.
El erudito bíblico Walter Brueggemann nos ha enseñado que los salmos hablan a nuestras vidas al grado que hemos sido destrozados o desorientados por los eventos. Uno no esperaría que un salmo nomistico como este—con su concentración inflexible sobre lo que está establecido y verdadero—encaje muy bien en la observación de Brueggemann. Sin embargo, sorprendentemente, parece ser así.
En toda su artificialidad sintética, el salmo 119 nos pide que consideremos si los seres humanos más destruidos o amenazados podrían necesitar, más que nada, una palabra.
El poeta que está detrás de nuestro salmo 104 contribuye a un compendio que añade a la acción de YHWH en la historia una celebración a su obra en creación. Es una bella rareza.
Curiosamente, dos características de la participación divina en la creación entretejen la celebración del salmista.
Primeramente, el salmista observa la acción divina no solo en la creación original, sino en el continuo sustento de las criaturas de YHWH. Cuando se toca esta nota, vemos también la colaboración de las criaturas. YHWH provee los recursos necesarios, y las criaturas responden reuniéndose si son animales, y en la labor del campo y del hogar si son humanos.
Él hace brotar la hierba para el ganado, y las plantas para el servicio del hombre, para que él saque alimento de la tierra, y vino que alegra el corazón del hombre, para que haga brillar con aceite su rostro, y alimento que fortalece el corazón del hombre.
Los árboles del Señor se sacian, los cedros del Líbano que Él plantó, donde hacen sus nidos las aves, y la cigüeña, cuya morada está en los cipreses.
Los montes altos son para las cabras monteses; las peñas son refugio para los tejones…
Todos ellos esperan en ti, para que les des su comida a su tiempo. Tú les das, ellos recogen; abres tu mano, se sacian de bienes.
(Salmo 104:14–15 … 27-28 LBLA)
En segundo lugar, no es solo el salmista el que se regocija en esta colaboración modelada y de sustento. YHWH mismo se alegra por esto, tal como el poeta en su contemplación.
¡Sea para siempre la gloria del Señor! ¡Alégrese el Señor en sus obras! Élmira a la tierra, y ella tiembla; toca los montes, y humean. Al Señor cantarémientras yo viva; cantaré alabanzas a mi Dios mientras yo exista. Séale agradable mi meditación; yo me alegraré en el Señor.
Aquí la creación no es objetivada de ninguna forma impersonal o mecánica. Es una comunidad viva y con aliento, diseñada por YHWH, poblada por seres que son totalmente dependientes de su provisión y encargada, en el caso de los seres humanos, de convertirla en una provisión ampliada y extendida para los demás.
El ciclo de vida y muerte se reconoce, un asentimiento dado a las temporadas de fulminante escasez. Nada de esto nubla o limita el regocijo del salmista, ni presumiblemente, el del Creador.
Los esfuerzos humanos sobre la vastedad del mar y en el desafío del suelo contribuye a una visión doxológica.
Hay sinergia, colaboración, e incluso una cierta imitación de Dios en todo esto.
Solo al final los “pecadores” y “los malvados” manchan sus glorias. Estos quedan encomendados al justo poder de YHWH.
El mundo como lo vemos no es, podríamos pausar para considerarlo, inevitable. Tampoco es ordinario. Es la obra de manos divinas. Todo se inclina al regocijo. Es una invitación incluso ahora a la risa apreciativa, a un corazón que se alegre al considerarla.
Canter Bridge 